iScale Kicks Off Second Phase of Collaboration to Document and Improve the Effectiveness of Advocacy to Prevent Violent Conflict

Innovations for Scaling Impact (iScale) has kicked off the second phase of its collaboration with various partner organizations to develop methodologies for documenting and improving the effectiveness of international advocacy efforts to prevent large-scale violent conflict. This phase of the project will see iScale working closely with a small number of leading organizations in the field of international conflict-prevention advocacy to develop innovative tools for these organizations to utilize in monitoring the influence of their efforts and guide their dynamic improvement of these efforts.

While iScale will work with each participating organization to develop a methodology especially suited to its needs, iScale and its collaborators will also engage in a year-long project of comparing their experiences with the methodologies, evaluating the methodologies’ usability and contribution to the social and political change goals of the organizations.

The lessons drawn from the year-long collaboration will be captured by iScale in a report that it will make available publicly in late 2011 to contribute to the developing body of literature on the contribution of monitoring and evaluation practices to the impact of social change programs, particularly those efforts targeted at broad and complex social change, such as the prevention of international conflict. In particular, iScale and its collaborators look to advance the field of assessment that is suitable for conflict-prevention work and that will lead to more rapid advancement to sustainable peace and security worldwide.

This second phase of the collaboration extends the work begun by iScale and its collaborators in January 2010, in which iScale benchmarked the impact practices used by six international NGOs to monitor and assess the their conflict-prevention advocacy efforts, identified good practices for monitoring and assessing international advocacy as exemplified by leaders in the field, and provided recommendations of approaches that are most promising for the monitoring and assessment of international conflict-prevention advocacy. 

This project strives to address common challenges that confront both organizations themselves engaged in international conflict-prevention advocacy and others supporting their work, including monitoring and assessing their influence and effectiveness in a way that provides both credible and objective evidence of their effectiveness and meaningful guidance for improvement of their effectiveness. From an operational perspective, it is imperative that any such frameworks and tools are easy to use and minimize the diversion of needed capacity from the "front-line" of advocacy work.

About Innovations for Scaling Impact (iScale):

The collaboration on monitoring and assessment of international conflict-prevention advocacy efforts falls within iScale's Peace+Security innovation stream, and is one of the initiatives of the global action network of leading efforts on international peacebuilding and conflict prevention.